Recently someone told me how much he loved golf. That wet grass, he said, you just wipe through it, and then, he added dreamily, hit that ball perfectly…
I understood what he meant. Hitting a ball perfectly is perhaps the most beautiful thing there is, the purest happiness. Angle, speed, point of contact, the body in relation to the ball, for a moment everything coincides with everything. I would like to give up love for it. If I hit a ball perfectly every day, I would gratefully put my wife on the street for it.
Sometimes a comment can herald the same moment of perfection, a gesture, the moment the photographer prints. All life and the world cooperate when that one, perfect word comes to mind from all possibilities – the body hangs in ideal curve from the fineliner, the ink flows wonderfully from the marker, the letters emerge beautifully. Sometimes I make such an enthusiastic point that the marker disappears in the pen.
You can also hit people perfectly, for example Bert’s head, I noticed, first class secondary school, but then the feeling of happiness did not come. Actually I didn’t even want to hit him, I always missed on purpose; for me it was all about the display, the social preservation. But because just as I was throwing my fist in his direction he came running at me, fist and head hit in the middle under eerily perfect conditions. I had never had a ball so full on the instep.
During the next lesson, he raised his hand. If he could go home. Nauseous. In the evening his parents came to our house, rightly so, because this had nothing to do with fighting anymore. Bert’s head had doubled in size. For now, he lay in a darkened bedroom, flat on his back.
At that time there was an insufferable little fellow living opposite us, who was very demanding. Every Wednesday afternoon Jordi would come out of the gate next to their house and walk up the steps to gesticulate the blood from my fingernails, but every time, as soon as I’d run across, he’d quickly fled behind their gate, where five or six huge dogs protected him.
This went on for a long time – I felt very helpless, unable to release my aggression. Until one afternoon I already stood with my back against their facade, waiting for him to venture outside their gate, walk up the sidewalk and start spying at me and I stood with two sideways steps behind him, between him and his escape route.
I didn’t hit Jordi perfectly. That wasn’t necessary either. I had enough with the silly expression on his face, the realization that the game was over, a line was drawn, a very big dot came after I told Jordi, turn around.